Latest this week
At Helis we closed out our seed round! We had initially started out as 8x Protocol over a year ago but since then have evolved as a project. The crux behind what we’re doing is focusing on building applications that utilise existing infrastructure already build (across protocols and blockchains). We’re currently working on releasing our next product that I’m keen to share with you all soon. For more details about the round you can read more about it over here:
Argent just announced one-click CDPs inside their mobile wallet with an interesting marketing campaign comparing the speed to create a CDP with Usain Bolt! Some members of the community are split about making it easy for people to accumulate debt. I think it’s a valid point since no one borrow crypto because they need it to pay for things (yet), they’re borrowing it to leverage long. Current DeFi borrowing rates are probably more expensive than credit cards, although they do have far less restrictions for sure. I think the next evolution in DeFi lending/borrowing will be a pooled liquidity model (like Compound) but interest rate swaps to enabled fixed-rate interest rates. For those of you who aren’t too familiar with interest rate swaps are, TLDR they allow speculators to speculate on the interest rates themselves by creating a new market entirely! Dharma tried to do fixed-rate with automated matching but that bet didn’t exactly pan out due to technical limitations. Another interesting evolution will be when more pairs become feasible to earn interest on. Right now stable coins are the only asset which are provide decent interest.
This was a really fascinating/hotly debated topic on Twitter yesterday about how fund managers should theoretically be outperforming cDai interest rates. Of course there’s many factors in play here and Ari Paul fiercely debates them but the fact that we can even have this discussion with healthy debate shows how crypto is suddenly making capital an even more accessible commodity. We’ve seen things in the Bay Area go from a few VCs deploying capital to micro-VCs appearing at a much quicker pace. Crypto is basically this process but on a global scale happening at a rapid pace. For the full debate I’d highly recommend reading through the entire Twitter thread:
On Chain Statistics
Total Locked in DeFi: $484M.
Biggest Gainer: Compound crossing over $100m in locked assets! Congrats to the team for this amazing metric.
Interesting Stat: Dharma’s total assets locked have shrunk from $30m to $10m. Let’s see where the next leg in their journey takes them.
Project Updates
We’re excited for the direction we’re taking and broad potential of the new AirSwap protocols. New Swap contract, decentralized indexers, and onchain liquidity. All open source. Read more in our newest blog post.
AirSwap hosted another #AirSwapNext with Crypto Bobby to discuss progress of DeFi, new AirSwap products and improvements, and initiatives with partners like MakerDAO and Keyrock.
Earlier this week, we launched AirSwap Trader–the first shareable, trustless escrow for Ethereum tokens with no deposits, no counterparty risk, and no trading fees. Learn more about Trader.